here (and that was funny, since dollar was some sort of nonsense word as far as she knew and peso was a measure of weight, of gravity itself), and she’d filled her cloth bag with a dozen tubes of morphine sulfate hypodermic tablets (¼ gr.) and ten of the diamorphine hydrochloride (⅙ gr.). And she got herself some new pravazes as well, the needle she carried in her very clever little kit (it was made to resemble an outsized cigarette lighter, with room for two tubes and the hypodermic itself) having become blunted through use and unpleasant in the extreme. When the purchase was completed, the two women in shawls watching her surreptitiously and the pharmacist smiling till she thought his head would burst, she gave him another word, which might have been Spanish—or maybe it was Latin: “Taxi.”
“Taxi,” he repeated, as if she’d just supplied the one term that would make his life complete. “Taxi, sí, ” and he shouted something toward a tumbled nest of straw baskets where a striped Mexican blanket concealed a doorway behind the counter. In the next moment, a boy with his eyes still asleep emerged, took one look at her and ran out into the street shouting the magic word.
The driver knew not a syllable of English, but San Diego was not an Anglican designation and the dollars she waved at him immediately bridged any difficulties of interpretation. The sun hammered her briefly and then she was in the back of the car, everyone grinning now—the pharmacist and the two customers who’d followed her out into the street, the boy and the taxi driver and even the random passerby, a whole world of dedicated grinning. The door shut on her, the car a Tin Lizzie, a flivver, a rattrap of the worst and flimsiest construction—and ancient, the first sedan ever made—but it had a roof, and, apparently, an engine. The thing jolted and bumped as if it were pitching headlong down the side of a cliff, the smells assaulted her all over again, the heat crouched atop her, right under the caftan (and she wouldn’t take it off, wouldn’t show her hair and the sweat and the fright she must have been), but none of that mattered for long because immediately she was dissolving a tablet in water and drawing it into her pravaz and between bumps finding a vein high up on her right thigh beneath the rolled-up sweat-soaked hem of her dress.
After that, the breezes blew and the smells dissipated. The man at the border waved them on without a second glance, the world took on a metallic sheen—the sheen of the high seas as seen from a deck chair on the SS Paris —and she wasn’t in Mexico anymore. She wasn’t in the bleached brown desert of San Diego either, not on land at all. She was on a cruise, perched high up on the rail with the wind in her face and the birds wheeling overhead, on her way back to France.
As it turned out, she didn’t get to Paris that year or the following year either. She went up to San Francisco for a while, but the place bored her—too far out of the way, too cold, too bright, what with the sun painted like a thin layer of glue over all those rows of gingerbread houses Frank would have hated till he ground his teeth to dust—and then she came back to Los Angeles for an extended stay with Leora Tisdell, 15 who’d just lost her husband. For a while, through the spring and into the summer of 1925, she set up a kiln in the back of Leora’s guesthouse and with her friend’s encouragement she began to work in clay again, just to see if she could recover her eye. (Leora had artistic aspirations of her own, and now, as she put it, that she was out from under the heel of her husband, she meant to do up California in oils.)
In the first week, Miriam produced a bust of Leora and Leora produced a portrait of Miriam. The portrait was meant to be naturalistic but it was so ineptly done it might have been an abstract by Picasso or Miró, and the only feeling Miriam derived from it was sadness.
“Taxi,” he repeated, as if she’d just supplied the one term that would make his life complete. “Taxi, sí, ” and he shouted something toward a tumbled nest of straw baskets where a striped Mexican blanket concealed a doorway behind the counter. In the next moment, a boy with his eyes still asleep emerged, took one look at her and ran out into the street shouting the magic word.
The driver knew not a syllable of English, but San Diego was not an Anglican designation and the dollars she waved at him immediately bridged any difficulties of interpretation. The sun hammered her briefly and then she was in the back of the car, everyone grinning now—the pharmacist and the two customers who’d followed her out into the street, the boy and the taxi driver and even the random passerby, a whole world of dedicated grinning. The door shut on her, the car a Tin Lizzie, a flivver, a rattrap of the worst and flimsiest construction—and ancient, the first sedan ever made—but it had a roof, and, apparently, an engine. The thing jolted and bumped as if it were pitching headlong down the side of a cliff, the smells assaulted her all over again, the heat crouched atop her, right under the caftan (and she wouldn’t take it off, wouldn’t show her hair and the sweat and the fright she must have been), but none of that mattered for long because immediately she was dissolving a tablet in water and drawing it into her pravaz and between bumps finding a vein high up on her right thigh beneath the rolled-up sweat-soaked hem of her dress.
After that, the breezes blew and the smells dissipated. The man at the border waved them on without a second glance, the world took on a metallic sheen—the sheen of the high seas as seen from a deck chair on the SS Paris —and she wasn’t in Mexico anymore. She wasn’t in the bleached brown desert of San Diego either, not on land at all. She was on a cruise, perched high up on the rail with the wind in her face and the birds wheeling overhead, on her way back to France.
As it turned out, she didn’t get to Paris that year or the following year either. She went up to San Francisco for a while, but the place bored her—too far out of the way, too cold, too bright, what with the sun painted like a thin layer of glue over all those rows of gingerbread houses Frank would have hated till he ground his teeth to dust—and then she came back to Los Angeles for an extended stay with Leora Tisdell, 15 who’d just lost her husband. For a while, through the spring and into the summer of 1925, she set up a kiln in the back of Leora’s guesthouse and with her friend’s encouragement she began to work in clay again, just to see if she could recover her eye. (Leora had artistic aspirations of her own, and now, as she put it, that she was out from under the heel of her husband, she meant to do up California in oils.)
In the first week, Miriam produced a bust of Leora and Leora produced a portrait of Miriam. The portrait was meant to be naturalistic but it was so ineptly done it might have been an abstract by Picasso or Miró, and the only feeling Miriam derived from it was sadness.
Similar Books
